Msgr. Brad H. Masssman thanks the viewers for participating in the “liturgy”. He doesn’t end with the Sign of the Cross.

Cardinal Thomas Collins of Toronto is a conservative and it is shocking that he allows this in his archdiocese.

The earth-goddess Gaia is referred to no less than eight times in the February 3, 2003 Document Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life, A Christian Reflection on the New Age (#2.3.1, #7.1, #7.2 twice).

#2.3.4.2: “Gaia“, Mother Earth, is offered as an alternative to God the Father, whose image is seen to be linked to a patriarchal conception of male domination of women. There is talk of God, but it is not a personal God; the God of which New Age speaks is neither personal nor transcendent. Nor is it the Creator and sustainer of the universe, but an “impersonal energy” immanent in the world, with which it forms a “cosmic unity”: “All is one”. This unity is monistic, pantheistic or, more precisely, panentheistic. God is the “life-principle”, the “spirit or soul of the world”, the sum total of consciousness existing in the world. In a sense, everything is God.

#2.3.4.3: James Lovelock’s book on theGaiaHypothesis claims that “the entire range of living matter on earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts”.To some, the Gaia hypothesis is “a strange synthesis of individualism and collectivism. It all happens as if New Age, having plucked people out of fragmentary politics, cannot wait to throw them into the great cauldron of the global mind”.

#2.5: [I]t is enough to point out that New Age shares with a number of internationally influential groups the goal of superseding or transcending particular religions in order to create space for a universal religion which could unite humanity. Closely related to this is a very concerted effort on the part of many institutions to invent a Global Ethic, an ethical framework which would reflect the global nature of contemporary culture, economics and politics. Further, the politicisation of ecological questions certainly colours the whole question of the Gaia hypothesis or worship of mother earth.

A pontifical act published on theHoly See Press Office websitetoday announced the appointment of Hans Joachim Schellnhuber to an academy under the direction of the Holy See:

The Holy Father has appointed Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Potsdam and director of the Institute for Climate Impact in Potsdam, Federal Republic of Germany, as ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences [sic].

Schellnhuber was chosen to be one amongfour speakersto talk at the roll-out of the Pope’s global warming encyclical Thursday, and is said to have helped draft the encyclical.

He’s a controversial appointee because, in addition to being a radical promoter of the theory of man-made climate change, he is an atheist and anadvocate of population control. He once said the carrying capacity of the earth is less than one billion; considering the earth currently holds more than seven billion people, this would mean he favors the reduction of the vast majority of mankind.

He has madecallsfor an “Earth Constitution that would transcend the UN Charter” and a “Global Council” comprised of members elected by everyone on earth. He has also suggested creation of a “Planetary Court … a transnational legal body open to appeals from everybody, especially with respect to violations of the Earth Constitution.”

ThePontifical Academy of Science was established in 1603, and consists of 80 academicians chosen among the world’s leading scientists and appointed by the Pope. The mission of the Academy is “to pay honor to pure science, wherever it is found, to assure its freedom and to promote its research.”

The Academy organized theglobal warming summitat the Vatican in April, which invited two United Nations leaders to address the conference: Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, UN Special Advisor on Millennium Development Goals. Both men havepromoted population control via greater access to contraception and abortion.

The Scientific Pantheist Who Advises Pope Francis

The scientist who influenced Laudato Si, and who serves at the Vatican’s science office, seems to believe in Gaia, but not in God.

St. Francis of Assisi’s hymn Laudato Si’spoke of “Brothers” Sun and Fire and “Sisters” Moon and Water, using these colorful phrases figuratively, as a way of praising God’s creation. These sentimental words so touched Pope Francis that he named his encyclical after this canticle (repeated in paragraph 87 of the Holy Father’s letter).

Neither Pope Francis nor St. Francis took the words literally, of course. Neither believed that fire was alive and could be talked to or reasoned with or, worse, worshiped. Strange, then, that a self-professed atheist and scientific advisor to the Vatican named Hans Schellnhuber appears to believe in a Mother Earth.

Gaia

The Gaia Principle, first advanced by chemist James Lovelock (who has lately had second thoughts) and microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, says that all life interacts with the Earth, and the Earth with all life, to form a giant self-regulating, living system.

This goes far beyond the fact that the Earth’s climate system has feedbacks, which are at the very center of the debate over climate change. In the Gaia Principle, Mother Earth is alive, and even, some think, aware in some ill-defined, mystical way. The Earth knows man and his activities and, frankly, isn’t too happy with him.

This is what we might call “scientific pantheism,” a kind that appeals to atheistic scientists. It is an updated version of the pagan belief that the universe itself is God, that the Earth is at least semi-divine — a real Brother Sun and Sister Water! Mother Earth is immanent in creation and not transcendent, like the Christian God.

What’s this have to do with Schellnhuber? In the 1999 Nature paper “‘Earth system’ analysis and the second Copernican revolution,” he said:

Ecosphere science is therefore coming of age, lending respectability to its romantic companion, Gaia theory, as pioneered by Lovelock and Margulis. This hotly debated ‘geophysiological’ approach to Earth-system analysis argues that the biosphere contributes in an almost cognizant way to self-regulating feedback mechanisms that have kept the Earth’s surface environment stable and habitable for life.

Geo-physiological, in case you missed it. Cognizant, in black and white. So dedicated is Schellnhuber to this belief that he says “the Gaia approach may even include the influence of biospheric activities on the Earth’s plate-tectonic processes.” Not the other way around, mind you, where continental drift and earthquakes effects life, but where life effects earthquakes.

He elaborates:

Although effects such as the glaciations may still be interpreted as over-reactions to small disturbances — a kind of cathartic geophysiological fever — the main events, resulting in accelerated maturation by shock treatment, indicate that Gaia faces a powerful antagonist. Rampino has proposed personifying this opposition as Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.

Mother Earth gets the flu and instead of white blood cells and a rise in temperature to fend off the infection, it sends white ice and a decrease in temperatures. How? Geophysiologically! I remind the reader that our author, writing in one of the world’s most prominent science journals, does not use these propositions metaphorically. He proposes them as actual mechanisms.

Schellnhuber echoes the theme of a cognizant, i.e. self-aware, planet in another (co-authored) 2004 paper in Nature 2004, “Climbing the co-evolution ladder,” suggesting again that mankind is an infection, saying that mankind “perturbs … the global ‘metabolism'” of the planet.

Tipping Points

Schellnhuber, a one-time quantum physicist who turned his attention to Mother Earth late in his career, was also co-author of a 2009 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper “Imprecise probability assessment of tipping points in the climate system,” which asked select scientists their gut assessment about the arrival of various “tipping points.” Tipping points are a theme of Schellnhuber’s research (see inter aliathis and this).

Tipping points are supposed moments when some doom which might have been avoided if some action had been taken, is no longer possible to avoid and will arrive no matter what. Tipping points have come and gone in climate forecasts for decades now. The promised dooms never arrive but the false prophets never quit. Their intent is less to forecast than to induce something short of panic in order to plead for political intervention. When the old tipping point is past, theorists just change the date, issue new warnings and hope no one will notice.

One of the tipping points Schellnhuber asked about was the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, depending on what the temperature did. All of the selected experts (who answered the questions in 2004 and 2005) gave moderate (~15-25%) to quite high probabilities (50-80%) for this event to have occurred by 2015. The ice did not melt.

Schellnhuber presented more tipping points to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2014 in the co-authored paper, “Climate-System Tipping Points and Extreme Weather Events.” In that paper, Schellnhuber has a “scientific” graph with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Adam “flicking” a planet earth over a methane tipping point, such that the earth would roll down into a fiery pit labeled the “Warming Abyss.” Hell on earth.

The Problem of People

Schellnhuber is most famous for predicting that the “carrying capacity” of the earth is “below” 1 billion people. When confronted with this, he called those who quoted him “liars.” But he then repeated the same claim, saying, “All I said was that if we had unlimited global warming of eight degrees warming, maybe the carrying capacity of the earth would go down to just 1 billion, and then the discussion would be settled.” And he has often said that this temperature tipping point would be reached — unless “actions” were taken.

The man is suspicious of people. In that same interview he said, “If you want to reduce human population, there are wonderful means: Improve the education of girls and young women.” Since young women already know where babies come from, and since this knowledge tends neither to increase nor decrease population, the “education” he has in mind must be facts about how to avoid the consequences of sex. Austin Ruse discovered a 2009 talk in which Schellnhuber said the earth “will explode” due to resource depletion once the population reaches 9 billion, a number that the UN projects in 2050. Presumably he wants earth to avoid that fate, so he must support the population control that Pope Francis so clearly repudiated in his encyclical.

Bad Religion

Confirmation bias happens when a scientist manipulates an experiment so that he gets the outcome he hoped he would get. When Schellnhuber invites only believers in tipping-points-of-doom to characterize their guesses of this doom, his view that the doom is real will be confirmed. And when he publishes a paper that says, “Scientists say world is doomed” the public and politicians believe it. Scientists skeptical of the doom are dismissed because they are skeptics. This isn’t good science. It’s really bad religion, and a pagan one at that.

Global warming research is characterized by an insider’s club. If you believe, you’re in. If you doubt, you’re out. This is also so at the Pontifical Academies of Science where Schellnhuber was appointed by Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo. The bishop locked scientists with contrary views out of the process, scientists he has repeatedly dismissed as “funded by the oil industry.” Given this, how likely is it that the Holy Father was fully aware of the views of the chief scientist who advised him?

Heaven and Earth:The scientist who advised the pope on his climate change message is a godless man whose Almighty is the Earth. We keep trying to adjust our set because there is something very wrong with this picture.

Pope Francis issued an encyclical last week that brought a lot of fire and brimstone his way, and deservedly so. He wandered far outside his divine calling and lectured his church about man’s role in global warming.

Anyone who wondered how he could do such a thing have their answer in Hans Schellnhuber, the microbiologist who advised Francis. Schellnhuber, The Stream reports, is a “self-professed atheist” who “appears to believe in a Mother Earth.”

That makes Schellnhuber, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a believer in Gaia, the name given to Earth as a mystical living system that some believe is deserving of worship.

Francis, we assume, does not worship the creation but instead the creator. His partnership with someone whose belief rests at almost the opposite end of the spectrum might make the faithful uncomfortable.

When Francis’ encyclical was leaked last week, we wondered if his position on the man-made global warming question was “amisuse of the authorityof the Roman Catholic Church and the church at large.”

Our conclusion has only been solidified by the revelation that the pope was in league with Schellnhuber.

The pope indicates that his primary trouble with global warming is its projected devastating impact on those at the socioeconomic bottom. He has been told, Bloomberg Business reports, by his Hindu advisor Veerabhadran Ramanathan that “thepoorest 3 billion peopleare going to suffer the worst consequences.”

But as Competitive Enterprise Institute founder Fred Smith wrote in Forbes, “it is theenvironmental proposalscurrently being championed as solutions, however, that are the real threat.”

The “environmental proposals” have never been about the environment anyway. Rather, they are,in the words of Ottmar Edenhofer, a U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change official, intended as vehicles for the “distribution of the world’s resources.”

From atheists to strong-arm redistributionists, this pope is unequally yoked with those who don’t share the tenets of his faith — but who are happy to use that faith to achieve their political aims. Yes, there’s truly something wrong here.

Hans Schellnhuber, a pantheist, is one of the Pope’s scientific advisors

ByPeter de Jesus, June 24, 2015

Pope Francis’ canticle,Laudato Si’¸ finds its roots in a hymn written by St. Francis of Assisi. The hymn spoke of “Brothers” Sun and Fire, as well as “Sisters” Moon and Water, powerful metaphors that must’ve resonated deeply within the Pope and the saint. Curiously enough however, one of the Pope’s scientific advisors may take the figurative statements of the hymn a little too realistically.

Hans Schellnhuber, a self-professed atheist, is one of Pope Francis’ prominent scientific advisors. What makes him even more remarkable, apart from his disbelief in a universal, omnipotent deity, is the fact that his beliefs lie very close to nature, according to The Stream.

Schellnhuber’s beliefs are most accurately called Pantheism, a variation of atheism which involves a belief system rooted in the concept of the Earth being a living, breathing organism, much like the mythological Gaia. Beyond considering the planet as a living being, pantheists believe that the Earth has a system equivalent to the human brain, which in turn reacts to the destructive things that humans initiate,reports Rush Limbaugh.

The beliefs of the Pope’s scientific advisor follows the Gaia principle, which was first advanced by chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970’s. The principle states that Mother Earth is alive, and to a point, even aware in some ill-defined, mystical manner. This means that the planet is quite literally the “brother” or “sister” to human beings, according to The Stream.

Schellnhuber has previously stated his beliefs in the Gaia principle, stating that “the Gaia approach may even include the influence of biospheric activities on the Earth’s plate-tectonic processes.” This means that, in a very concise manner, natural calamities and events do not affect human life; rather, it is human life that influences natural calamities and events.

What Do We Do When the Pope Gets It Wrong?

Must Catholics torture our minds with North Korean gymnastics, forcing ourselves to agree with each papal statement?

Catholics should, of course, charitably consider what the pope has to say. But, ultimately, are we obliged to agree with either his scientific assessment or his policy recommendations? If the pope predicts it will rain, but then it doesn’t, must we say that it is “raining spiritually” but we are too sinful to see it?

I heard a lecture from a priest a few days ago which insisted that we must, that not just papal encyclicals but even ordinary papal lectures on Wednesday afternoons might well form part of the “ordinary magisterium,” which some Catholics consider to be protected from error by the Holy Spirit. In other words, the pope is something very close to an oracle, coming out with divinely-ordained truths at least once a week.

This is not what the Church teaches, and a good thing too, because it is manifest nonsense. We can see that it is nonsense simply by toting up the statements on which popes have contradicted each other, or which Church councils or catechisms have later gone on to reverse.

[…]

Then-cardinal Ratzinger said approvingly in 1982 that the Vatican II constitution Gaudium et Speswas a “counter-syllabus” to that issued by Pius IX. The future Pope Benedict XVI knew that the Church is not sacramentally married to every assertion on economics and politics by any pope. Nor are laymen. If popes could be wrong about something like slavery -when Protestant laymen like William Wilberforce were right — they might also be wrong about immigration or economics or climate science.

Does anyone really think while the Holy Spirit failed to prevent popes from approving slavery, He has given Pope Francis infallible insight into the sensitivity of the climate to carbon dioxide and how best to solve the problem? The reality is that popes might be hearkening too closely to secular wisdom, liberal opinion or dominant forces in powerful countries (like the EU), just as previous popes were when they defended slavery.

Our Lord has made His intentions perfectly clear by letting popes contradict each other on such subjects — when He could easily have prevented it. Catholics believe God does prevent popes from erring on central and narrowly-defined matters of faith or morals, much as He protected the biblical authors from error. The credibility of this doctrine is only undermined when we confuse it with contradictory scientific and economic papal opinions. God never meant to leave behind an oracle. When we invent one to shore up our political preferences, we are forging a golden calf.

This article reprints with permission relevant sections of “The Myth of Catholic Social Teaching,” with a few minor updates, from the site The Catholic Thing.

See LAUDATO SI’– ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME POPE FRANCIS MAY 24, 2015